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Jnchc, Vol. 24, No. 2: Frontmatter And Backmatter, National Collegiate Honors Council

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

JNCHC: Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council

Forum on Creating an Honors Faculty

Vol. 24, No. 2 | Fall/Winter 2023

Masthead

Contents

Call for papers

Editorial policy

Dedication: Cliff Jefferson and Mitch Pruitt

About the authors

About the NCHC monograph series

NCHC monographs and journals

NCHC publications order form

In this issue

Jnchc 23:1 Backmatter

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

about the research authors

about the nchc monograph series

NCHC Monographs & Journals

NCHC Publications Order Form

In This Issue

Forging An Honors Bond, Taylor C. Bybee

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

As part of the National Collegiate Honors Council’s (2022) collection of essays about the value of honors to its graduates (1967–2019), the author reflects on the personal and professional impacts of the honors experience.

Standing in line at the local fire station, my wife and I were waiting for our COVID-19 inoculations. The firefighters had been commissioned to administer the vaccines. Health department workers were examining paperwork, and volunteers were guiding patrons through the line. Looking around while trying to manage our children, I noticed a volunteer with a familiarlooking face, half-concealed by a mask. I had not seen the …

“Best Of Both Worlds”: Alumni Perspectives On Honors And The Liberal Arts, Angela King Taylor, Kelsey Daniels, Molly Knowlton

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This study explores the extent to which skills acquired through liberal arts curricula facilitate immediate post-graduate employment of honors college alumni. Using qualitative methods and semi-structured interviews (n = 16), authors examine the honors college experience and the attainment of skills through the lens of graduates (2017–2020) at a large research institution. Results indicate that while honors alumni identify certain skills that helped them realize initial employment, they were often unable to translate and apply these skills in professional workplaces, particularly nonacademic ones. Data further suggest that liberal arts skills (communication, research competence, critical reasoning, intercultural competence, interdisciplinary inquiry, disciplinary …

Bridging The Interval: Teaching Global Awareness Through Music And Politics, Galit Gertsenzon

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Inquiry in Global Studies: Music and Politics is a regular course offering in which first-year honors students examine the social and cultural import of music in a global context. This qualitative study examines the practical and pedagogical implications of teaching music and politics during the coronavirus crisis. In a thematic, five-part series analyzing non-Western music both in service to the government and as protest against it, the author describes how students perceived the commonalities and diversities in global culture, history, politics, and society through music while at the same time demonstrating growth in music-making processes and confronting a remote learning …

Becoming Legible: Helping Students Navigate Promotional Genres Of Self-Narration, Anton Vander Zee

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The five-paragraph essay is a hard genre to love. Its inverted-triangle intro has enlightened us with too many “dawns” of some monolithic “man.” It reduces arguments, which tend to be rather subtle creatures, to the confines of a single-sentence thesis. It confects arguments in bland triplicate structure, as if any claim could be made more palatable by a perfectly bland Neapolitan blend. And it encourages seeing conclusions as a venue for gratuitous repetitions that insult the reader’s intelligence and memory alike. Beyond sponsoring these infelicities, the five-paragraph model, as Kimberly Hill Campbell notes in a recent issue of Educational Leadership …

Homo Sapiens, All Too Homo Sapiens: Wise Man, All Too Human, Amaris Ketcham

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico, a mere three hundred miles from the University of New Mexico where I teach, is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). This deep, geologic storehouse will entomb nuclear weapons waste for the next 10,000 years. The transuranic elements—elements with an atomic number of 92, uranium, or higher—are unstable and radioactive, and they decay at a half-life rate that makes them dangerous environmental contaminants. During the planning phase of the WIPP’s construction, the Department of Energy hired archaeologists, historians, linguists, materials scientists, and science fiction writers to address questions such as the one paraphrased here: How …

16.2 Contributors

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

No abstract provided.

Using Iceland As A Model For Interdisciplinary Honors Study, Kim Andersen, Gary Thorgaard

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Interdisciplinarity is a well-established educational approach that speaks directly to our understanding of what knowledge is and, more specifically, what practical knowledge is. Despite its long history, the concept of interdisciplinarity continues to raise essential questions: whether knowledge is anchored in particular fields of investigation separate in nature or can be found in a breaching of disciplines, across fields of investigation; how we might attain such cross-reference; and whether it is even possible to achieve a synthetic, interdisciplinary understanding or if knowledge is invariably anchored in separate disciplines occasionally informing each other. The term has not just epistemological value but …

Factors Influencing Honors College Recruitment, Persistence, And Satisfaction At An Upper-Midwest Land Grant University, Timothy J. Nichols, Kuo-Liang Matt Chang

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Student success and the “completion agenda” are important issues in higher education today (Complete College America). For honors programs and colleges, understanding and advancing these issues requires data-driven approaches tailored to the unique honors student population and broader institutional contexts. Honors faculty and administrators hoping to succeed in their recruitment, retention, and graduation efforts need an accurate understanding of why students decide to enroll and persist as well as their satisfaction with honors experiences. Our research data provide particular insight into the student experience at South Dakota State University (SDSU) but may also be instructive to a broader audience of …

John Boswell: Posting Historical Landmarks At The Leading Edge Of The Culture Wars, Jeffery Cisneros

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

One of the most enduring and controversial figures in the field of history is John E. Boswell. His work on homosexuality and the history of the Christian Church was published at a key time during the Stonewall Riots in the late 1960s and the removal of homosexuality from the list of diagnostic mental disorders in the mid 1970s. This social upheaval created a dynamic that not only influenced Boswell personally but contributed to the vehement reaction to his book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. …

Faculty-Led International Honors Programs, Rosalie C. Otero

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

We know that one of the major reasons for encouraging our students to study outside of the United States is to broaden their knowledge and understanding of the world. The insights and personal experiences that students gain from living, speaking, and taking part in the culture they are studying are immeasurable. Students also improve their professional potential. An international study program can provide students with cognitive and affective competencies necessary for them to thrive in a global economy, and it can provide the nation with citizens who are economically and politically savvy. Substantive research demonstrates some of the core values …

The Honors Differential: At Home And Abroad, Neil H. Donahue

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Study abroad constitutes already the kind of enrichment that defines honors education at home. The honors component of instruction at home in the U.S. emerges from the differential between the regular course of instruction and the extension, or rather qualitative enrichment, of the same through various types of added conceptual complexity, scope of detail, depth of inquiry, or level of skill. That honors differential can be tracked visibly and explicitly onto a syllabus in a regular course through highlighted assignments for eligible students; or can be embedded invisibly and implicitly in a designated honors course the syllabus for which makes …

Realizing Early English Drama, Molly Maclagan

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In May of 2010 a group of students from the Kent State University Honors College participated in a rare undertaking: presenting a medieval play as part of an international production of the whole play-cycle from which it originates. The students were five hundred years removed from the original context of that play and cycle. The earliest mention of The Chester Cycle comes from a 1422 legal dispute regarding the responsibilities of the guilds that were producing one of the plays in it, the language of which makes clear that the play-cycle was already well-established by that time. This historical remove …

Thesis As Rhizome: A New Vision For The Honors Thesis In The Twenty-First Century, Kate Briggs

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Richly diverse, the collective undergraduate thesis work that students produce across the United States in our honors programs and colleges is cause for celebration of their individual achievements. Generally considered the founder of honors education, Frank Aydelotte centered his honors program model at Swarthmore in the early twentieth century on individual achievement (see Rinn, 2003), which has thus defined honors from the beginning; it is a cardinal honors value, and the thesis is its primary manifestation.

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council -- Volume 9, No. 1 -- Complete Issue

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

CONTENTS

Call for Papers
Submission Guidelines
Dedication to John Grady
Editor’s Introduction -- Ada Long

FORUM ON “HONORS CULTURE”
Defining Honors Culture -- Charlie Slavin
The Culture of Honors -- George Mariz
Creating an Honors Culture -- Jim Ford
Honors Culture Clash: The High Achieving Student Meets the Gifted Professor -- Annmarie Guzy
The Prairie Home Companion Honors Program -- Paul Strong
The Times They Are A-Changin’ -- Dail Mullins

RESEARCH ESSAYS
The New Model Education -- Gary Bell.
The Role of Advanced Placement Credit in Honors Education -- Maureen E. Kelleher, Lauren C. Pouchak, and Melissa A. Lulay
Towards …

The Culture Of Honors, George Mariz

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

What is it that we talk or write about when we talk or write about the culture of honors? Almost always we begin with the second term in the phrase, i.e., honors, the enterprise embodied in programs and colleges in which virtually all of the readers of this journal are engaged. If we think at all about the first term, culture, it is almost certainly for no more than a few minutes, if at all, and then move forward to the really important work. As I write this piece, I am at the moment creating a syllabus for a class …

Women In Honors Education: The Case Of Western Washington University, George Mariz

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This essay is concerned with women and their educational experience in an Honors Program, and with their educational choices. It deals briefly with the history of women in higher education in the Western world and in the light of this history compares WWU Honors women with historical trends, with men and women students in the institution, and with students nationally in terms of major choices and career aspirations. It is not an attempt to view Honors women’s education comprehensively nor to look at WWU women along side Honors women more generally. In fact, it is not possible to do so, …

Unity In Diversity: The Virtues Of A Metadisciplinary Perspective In Liberal Arts Education, Alexander Werth

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Remember the story of the blind men and the elephant? Each man touches a different part of the animal (its side, trunk, tusk, leg, ear, and tail) and pronounces his find a wall, a snake, a spear, a tree, a fan, or a rope. As the poet Godfrey Saxe (1816-1997) wrote of the blind men in his retelling of this ancient Indian parable, “Though each was partly in the right, they all were in the wrong” (Galdone, 1973). This allegory quickly encapsulates the benefits, and the challenges, of seeing, or not seeing, something through multiple perspectives—in short, it illuminates the …

Understanding Caesar’S Ethnography: A Contextual Approach To Protohistory, Erin Osborne Martin

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The Celts of western and central Europe1 flourished during the height of Greek and Roman civilization, and yet there is a methodological schism between the study of the Mediterranean world and that of the “peripheral” Europeans. Our appreciation of classical society stems primarily from the plentiful written texts – texts that provide us with minute details of society, religion, and politics from the words of the people who actively participated in that culture. The study of the Celts, on the other hand, is more oblique: our primary source is archaeology, and what little textual evidence we do have derives from …

“Expressive Technology”: Multimedia Projects In Honors Courses, Patricia Worrall

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

“How might one build a creative arts component . . . into a course not otherwise involved with the creative arts?” was one of the questions Rusty Rushton posed in his Call for Papers for the volume titled “Honors and the Creative Arts.” His question caught my attention. The NCHC’s Mission Statement calls upon us as teachers of Honors courses “to enhance opportunities (academic, cultural, and social) responsive to educational needs of highly able and/or exceptionally motivated undergraduate students.” On the other hand, however, we may feel, as Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe clearly do, that “we often …

Editorial Matter For Volume 2, Number 2, Ada Long, Dail Mullins, Rusty Rushton

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Editorial Policy
Contents
Call for Papers
Submission Guidelines
Dedication
Editor's Introduction, Ada Long
About the Authors

Full Circle: The Reappearance Of Privilege And Responsibility In American Higher Education, George Mariz

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Anyone familiar with current initiatives in higher education is well aware of the increasing emphasis on public service as a component of an undergraduate degree, and the rhetoric of contemporary dialogues might well lead one to believe that public service is an entirely new concept in American higher education. This essay offers a different view. Far from being new, public service in one form or another was a significant element of the college curriculum from the seventeenth century until the Civil War. The reappearance of this notion, I believe, signals a rebirth, but at the same time marks a departure …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council -- Volume 2, No. 1 -- Complete Issue

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

CONTENTS

Call for Papers
Submission Guidelines :
Dedication
Editor's Introduction, Ada Long

EDUCATIONAL TRANSITIONS
Full Circle: The Reappearance of Privilege and Responsibility in American Higher Education, George Mariz
Telling Tales Out of School: Academic Novels and Memoirs by Women, Betty Krasne
Helping Honors Students Improve Critical Thinking, Julie Fisher Robertson and Donna Rane-Szostak
Science Literacy and the Undergraduate Science Curriculum: Is It Time To Try Something Different?, Dail Mullins

FORUM ON HONORS AND HIGHER EDUCATION
Cultivating: Some Thoughts on the NCHC's Future, Samuel Schuman
Further Thoughts on the Future of the NCHC, Joan Digby
A Small Step, Len Zane
Cultivating …

A Biochemist In Honors, Dail Mullins

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In 1984-quite unlike the depressed protagonist of George Orwell's novel-I found myself happily ensconced as a senior research associate in the department of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). I had received my Ph.D. in biochemistry from the same institution nine years earlier; had left for two years to do a post-doctoral fellowship in the field of cancer biology at Georgetown University and the National Institutes of Health; but had returned to U AB at the invitation of my doctoral mentor, Jim Lacey, to work on a project grant he had been awarded from …

Learning And Research With Students: The Example Of The Tilton/Beecher Scandal, Carol Kolmerten

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

To read any number of Jeremiads on lithe death of literature" or on "literature lost" lately might make most anyone believe that liberal learning is dead in English departments across the country. The twin evils of feminist scholarship (whose practitioners insist upon social readings of texts) and deconstruction (whose practitioners debunk "timeless truths") have, according to such authors as Alvin Kernan or John Ellis, cheated students out of having a meaningful liberal arts education with old fashioned teachers who love their subject and impart it to their students.

Books, Books, Books, Ted Estess

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Just after 9 p.m., I climbed abroad a Continental Trailways bus and stared through green glass as my parents watched the second of their two sons head off to college. Leaving the station, the bus moved into the bayous of south Louisiana along old Highway 90, then over the swamps and across rice and sugar cane fields and on through a night of small towns, finally climbing the Sabine River bridge into Texas, where a mileage marker announced New Mexico 878 miles. That should give any young man enough room.

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council -- Volume 1, No. 1 -- Complete Issue

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Contents

Call for Papers
Submission Guidelines
Editor's Note
Catherine's Plenty, Samuel Schuman

Introduction to Section One: Collegiate Instruction, Anne Ponder
Books, Books, Books, Ted L. Estess
Leading a College as a Liberal Arts Practice, Leon C. Malan, Judith Muyskens, Anne Ponder, and Ann Page Stecker
Empathy and the Questioning Spirit in Liberal Education: Reports from the Field, Sara Varhus

Introduction to Section Two: Styles of Learning, Anne Ponder
Leading and Learning in Community, Faith Gabelnick
Liberal Education and the Challenge of Intergrative Learning, Bernice Braid .
Learning and Research with Students: The Example of the Tilton/Beecher Scandal, Carol Kolmerten
On …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council -- Volume 1, No. 2 -- Complete Issue

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

CONTENTS

Call for Papers
Submission Guidelines
Dedication
Editor's Note, Dail Mullins

SCIENTISTS IN HONORS
A Physicist in Honors, Len Zane
A Biochemist in Honors, Dail Mullins

TEACHING SCIENCE IN HONORS
The Curiosity Shop (Or, How I Stopped Worrying About Delta Shapes and Started Teaching), Susan Tomlinson
Creative Approaches to Teaching Science in an Honors Setting, Ursula L. Shepherd
FUNDING FOR SCIENCE IN HONORS
Grant Supportfrom the National Science Foundation to Improve Undergraduate Education for All Students in Science and Mathematics, Engineering and Technology, Herbert Levitan
An NIH- and NSF-Funded Program in Biological Research for Community College Students, Thomas P. Arnold, …